Epic games hosted there annual winter jam, for this game jam I teamed up with Lee Stockton who went into a generalist role and help with level design. We also had Robyn Murphy, Cat Wiltshire and Laura Flinders join the team and they worked on the art style and models for the game jam entry. I undertook the role of game designer / level designer for this game jam.

You can download Amaze & Ablaze here

The theme for the jam was all’s fair in love and war and the team decided that we should add a multiplayer feature to the game so we could enter the special category friends and foes – a shared screen multiplayer game.

We had a lot of ideas floating around for this game jam but the one everyone like was having a maze that you could control and move a ball around avoid war style traps and collect love coins to advance you further into the maze castle. With this we made a multiplier version where one user could control up and down and the other user could control left and right.

Hello, welcome to my blog about the development of my honours degree. In the blog post I will show the development process from concept to production of the game I created for this course.

For this project I wanted to work on my game design for my portfolio as this is an area I am interested in having within the industry. For the project as I am focusing on game design my pipeline will be a little different from the traditional method but keeping to the pre-production, production and post-production pipeline. The pre-production will be the same method, the production will just focus on creating the mechanics needed for the game and finally for the post-production will be for the visual and aesthetics of game.
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Welcome to the blog about the development behind Iron Impact, a showcase piece I created for my portfolio to show off my game design, level design and character mechanics.

The concept idea behind this was to learn a more advanced version of character implantation than I previously learned, I previously learned how to set up a basic character animation blueprint and a complex and out-dated way to set up a character and enemy blueprint which was full of errors and cover ups.

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Over the summer Unreal Engine hosted another game jam, I teamed up with 3D artist Lee Stockton for this game jam. The theme was “That escalated quickly” and ran from 16th of August until the 21st of August.
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We split the roles between ourselves, I did the game and level design and Lee created the 3D models required for the game. 


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​We initially had the idea of an endless climber which would grow more and more difficult over time, I came up with the idea of utilising a climb system so as not to be a monotonous platform game. We came up with a few ideas of where the game was going to be based and felt while designing the level it would be best to be an inside and make an element rush the player to the end of the level. We then came up with the idea of a miner trying to escape a mine shaft, where an explosion caused the flooding of the mine itself. 

This idea then evolved further by making it about a cave dweller whose home becomes flooded from an unknown source and the water begins to rise. This is how we both utilised the theme, as the water escalated quickly and so did the difficulty of the platforming sections.
 

During the spring break Unreal Engine hosted another game jam, I teamed up with 3D artist Lee Stockton and Jamie Dubuisson for this game jam. The theme was “Transformation” and ran from 10th May until the 15th May 2018
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We split the job roles between us, I did the game and level design, Lee did the 3D models and Jamie created the Sci-Fi robot.

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We decided on the concept of a side scroller puzzle game and we came up with the idea of a game that transformed through the ages of sci-fi. This would begin with old 1950's sci-fi and progress through to modern day utilising effects and overlays to depict the TV of that era as well as all the little mistakes often seen within them. 

Instead of doing a generic sci-fi game we decided to design the game around been on an old 1950’s movie set and you take control of one of the actors following a script. 

We did not manage to complete this theme but utilised another aspect of transformation and had it so the player could switch between a human and a robot to solve puzzles and achieve victory over the evil space wizard.

Hi all this is Lee from Harlan Designs, this post will go over the winter jam that we participated in. The UE4 Winter Jam was the first game jam that Me and Alan competed in as a team, This was done under the name of Team Harlan using Alan's small company name as part of the team name. It took a little while to come up with an idea after the theme was announced. The theme was on thin ice, this can be seen in the image below.

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Welcome to Harlan designs new website! Keep and eye out on the news page about current projects and upcoming projects and news.